Ever get bored when posting a rhetorical(not-needing-replies) post and just decide to add a poll for fun?

The positioning of the objects is very suggestive.

3%

[ 1 ]

We all know that JJ causes peculiar eroticies in others, having her in an ad was a bad idea.

3%

[ 1 ]

You generally find people less-sexy when they're pointing a gun at your head, hence the third making it.

3%

[ 1 ]

The positioning does kind of get you thinking...

3%

[ 1 ]

Wait a minute! These options all have something to do with the subject, and nothing to do with the poll question! That's cheating!

3%

[ 1 ]

Added by Fost: There's nothing sexually explicit about any of this

80%

[ 21 ]

Total Votes : 26

Author

Message

X-FighterTroll

Joined: 07 Mar 2004

Location: ...

Posted: Thu Apr 22, 2004 5:20 am Post subject:

Actually, scarily enough, we're on-topic for this discussion.

We're discussing reasons why the pics could look indecent to some, and completely indifferent to others.

Current logistic: Features of certain cultures affect the perspectives of their members--this is no exception--and supporting thought.

This actually a really cool thread because almost all of this is on-topic, despite how little it sounds like it has to do with the main subject.(Except the Avatars, they're off-topic, and I think this post is too. )

Last edited by X-Fighter on Thu Apr 22, 2004 2:41 pm; edited 1 time in total

You'll note this shows that 1 in every 38 New Yorkers were assaulted in 2001. Worse yet, for 15 consecutive years of the 36 shown, 1 in every 18 New Yorkers were assaulted!!

I'm sorry, but I don't see how you interpreted that from the figures. Assuming that you're going off the larger offences reported (rather than confirmed crimes) you have about 98,000 violent crimes in a population of roughly 19,000,000. That's 1 in every 195 or so suffering assault or robbery. Are you perhaps working from the figures for general crime, which include burglary and other forms of theft? I'm not saying this is good, and I understand it's wise to be prudent in matters of safety, but it's no reason to live in fear.

There were around 1 million total offenses in each of those years, for a population of 18 million people. Things like getting mugged don't count as a "violent" crime(you just had someone point a gun at your head while you forked over your purse/wallet), but it does figure into that. "Violent" crimes only include rape, murder, aggrivated assault and battery.

I really don't mean to be obtuse, but please look at the table you've referenced. "Robbery" (of which mugging is a subset) is included in the figures for violent crime. By far the majority of crime is property crime: burglary, larceny and auto-theft. Yes, these are bad things. But they are a) generally not as bad as violent crime, b) of less significance for how safe you feel walking the streets, c) not measuring the same thing that I was using as the basis of my comparison, and d) of no bearing on my rather limited assertion that a number of Americans I know are far more fearful than I am of crime in a city with a crime-rate not dissimilar to my own.

Please note that I agree that New York is not a model of safety. I only ever asserted that it does not appear to be substantially more dangerous than the city I inhabit and am not afraid of. If we agree on this then I don't think there's much else we need to say about New York.

In a related (but potentially increasingly off-topic) note, I would be interested to hear opinions on the case put forward by "Bowling for Columbine" that the US media promotes a culture of fear. I felt this was a far more compelling argument in the film than the dubious anti-gun argument. If anything the film caused me to move from an anti-gun position to a neutral one.

Hm. I was quite certain they're prosecuted differently because of the actual harm inflicted... the lack of physical contact alters the severity of the crime, and such. Anyway, the point was, the historical crime rate earned the city the "be careful there" reputation. I think the relatively high crime rate compounded with the paranoia of the culture would make sense.

As far a paranoia...for ages, the wisdom you're always supposed to tell your kids: "Don't talk to strangers", so they won't get kidnapped; "Never answer the phone when home alone" so people won't ascertain this fact and then rob the place; "Don't take candy from strangers", so the kids won't accidentally get drug laced ingestables. The chance this will happen to any given family is something like 1% of 1%, but it's the status quo.

The irony of the paranoia cross-sections the obliviousness--one entire City's teenage population was quarantined because they had all managed to get infected with STDs, and the parents were completely baffled as to how their children had managed to get infected. There's enough fun "surprises" like that to feed the basis of the paranoia, yet statistical analysis normally shows the paranoia to be truly baseless.

So yes, we are paranoid. We're paranoid, we're up-tight, and we blew up Iraq because we heard a rumor from a drunk guy that they looked at us funny. Maybe we need more "provocative" StarScape ads to desensitize us.